domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
AmericanSaxeCoburgGothic
Happy to be here! Goal is to post the most exclamation points.
44m ago
"When you smile, the whole world smiles with you"
functor
48m ago
In other words there is no rules based international order, there is just powergrabs. If that is the case then it is expected that other countries will be weary of the US and their power. Why be vulnerable to a country that is nothing more than extractive empire? The US has a problem and it is that the rest of the world is no longer far behind the US and therefore they can't bully countries to submission.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1hr ago
Look, I completely understand that you're unhappy with what @TitaniumButterfly said, and understandably so. He's been warned by @Amadan, and presuming he doesn't clean up his act, or at least say such things in a less maximally inflammatory manner, he's probably going to end up banned.
However, your own response, especially submitted as a top level comment in this thread, doesn't fly either. I'm not going to put anything on your mod record, since you're new and justifiably incensed, but at the very least, you need to put more effort into a rebuttal. Yes, I'm aware of how weird that sounds.
If you'd just stated this as a reply, I probably wouldn't have bothered to respond or put on the mod hat, but once someone has been modded for their actions, you should leave it at that and not performatively call them out to make a rhetorical point. After all, to make a very lukewarm defense of them, they went into a great deal of explaining as to why they hold the view that they do.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
It is someone living in a totally unadapted mytho-poetic sense. Saying “his first experience being alive was dropping into his mother’s womb like being dropped in the dark” is a poetic feeling, what a post-enlightenment person would merely call a metaphor. It brings him some personal motivating value, and so he asserts that the feeling is a literal fact to heighten its potency. It reminds me of a less adapted Javier Milei, who speaks to the spirit of his dog (currently residing at the foot of God) and receives economic advice from him. Or Napoleon who believed that he was guided by a particular star. Terrence’s asserted metaphor sadly have to do with things where literal factuality is very important and cared about.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
Why didn’t he get it back before punching me? Something something there are good reasons why Jeroboam had his money in my pocket before punching me and it’s very sticky.
Is there not an obvious OPSEC explanation? You had a prior understanding that you and Jeroboam were in good relation and that he was literally investing in the relationship, with the expectation that it was a long-term investment. If he suddenly asks for his money back, you're gonna start wondering what he's up to, what's changed, why is he acting so weird? Imagine Avon Barksdale saying, "Yo String, I love what you've been doing with investing our money, but actually, I'd like to just withdraw my half. Cash. Right now. What am I gonna do with it? I don't know; nothing in particular. I just like looking at it." Even high-level corporate folks are often required to have significant investment in their own companies, and questions are asked if they seem to be withdrawing too much. "Do they know something? Are they thinking that this corporate partnership is becoming a bad deal? Might they jump ship?" If having the investment is essentially known to all parties to be, in part, a trust mechanism to indicate whether everything is normal and good and that defection can be "punished" by confiscating part/all of that investment, sudden withdrawal of that investment may contain a lot of signal. Maybe dude just wants to build a new mansion or buy twitter or something... but maybe...
In the international realm, there is a delicate balance between quietly trying to organize your affairs to try to make your regime more sanctions-proof and retaining enough ambiguity about the likelihood that you're going to suckerpunch someone.
2rafa
1hr ago
European countries do often have cheaper data than the US, but that's not the main reason why Americans use iMessage. The main reason is that early smartphone adoption in the US was extremely iPhone centric for anyone (a) under 40 and (b) not-poor. That has only grown more skewed over time. Premium Android phones in the iPhone price range are almost unheard of in the US - especially outside some first-gen immigrants from China/India (who use WeChat/Whatsapp). In Europe a lot of early smartphone adoption was HTC/Samsung/Sony Android devices; it's not uncommon for PMC types to have thousand dollar Samsung Galaxy whatever phones, although the trend is still toward iPhone in the long term. Not a single one of my American coworkers has an Android, ever.
This means that in a work group or social environment in the US for middle-class and above people, setting up a chat on iMessage is always an option, whereas in Europe even if 3/5 or 8/10 people use iPhone, you still use Whatsapp to include the others.
2rafa
1hr ago
Russia wanted Ukraine in its sphere, America wants it in its sphere. There's nothing original about this exact kind of proxy conflict, they've been happening between these very parties since 1945. If Russia or China (or anyone else) wanted to sanction the US and allies for supporting Euromaidan, they obviously could. They don't because it's transparently not in their interest.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
I want your life. I haven't been to a proper good concert since around 2002 when I saw Vladimir Ashkenazy conduct some orchestra in Tokyo doing Rachmaninoff's Symphony No.2 E Minor. Actually I did go to a John Williams tribute concert in Kobe with my family a few years ago, but we only managed that because the boys knew a lot of the music from films. That was fun, but they didn't play some of the best pieces Williams has done for whatever reason. Plus because it was a "tribute" some rando was conducting--it wasn't actually John Williams, which would have been amazing.
I really want to get back into seeing orchestras perform. There's nothing quite like it. The music itself is one thing, but seeing so many expert musicians playing together is transcendent, and really takes you out of the mundane and is something close to experiencing real beauty.
Edit: Also as I have posted before I love me some Wagner.
2rafa
3hr ago
I think the whole debate is a little pedantic, since (as you note) many of these issues are highly interrelated. The foreign policy dimension is also understated since Britain was both the center of the abolitionist movement and the main exporter of industrial/manufactured goods to the US, chafed at tariffs, was worried about the Union invading Canada or causing trouble for the Caribbean colonies and sympathized to some extent culturally with the South. The stereotypical Dixie argument can be made persuasively and isn't wrong, it just lies by omission; the same is true for the union 'it was just about slavery' argument.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
Today I learned Yudkowsky did a Harry Potter Fanfic. The more you know.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
The only Doyle book I ever actually read was Hound of the Baskervilles and that was when I was a kid. I enjoyed the mystery part but that particular book has almost a supernatural (or almost supernatural) air. I remember really liking it. At the time I had recently watched the very B film one late night with my buddy called Devil Dog: Hound of Hell which, thank you modern tech, you can now watch in its entirety on YouTube.. Do not take this as a recommendation. I was a kid. It was cool then.
Having written that, I watched both Downey (Jr.) films with my sons and they enjoyed them, so I enjoyed them. I also liked the Cumberbatch series, which I saw on the heels of watching The Mentalist with my wife (one of the handful of series we used to watch together. I need a new one to watch with her if anyone has recommendations.) That show owed a lot to Holmes. The smarts-win-the-day, and defeat the bad guy, that was what I always liked, to echo (somewhat) @fishtwanger.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3hr ago
That’s also why nobody really wants to have to be tied down to you. To hand your money to another person and be tied to their rules if they want the money back. China doesn’t want dollars after seeing what we attempted to do to Russia over Ukraine. Disconnected from the banking system, assets frozen, and a massive divestment campaign were attempts to hamstring the economy of Russia once it broke the Western world’s rules. China wants Taiwan. China also known it will get similar treatment if it invades. Hence they don’t want dollars.
Gold I think is less of a Ponzi scheme than government fiat currency. Gold is an established global market, it has uses in industrial manufacturing, and in making jewelry. It’s therefore not dependent on the fiscal system of any single country the way a fiat currency would be. Not only can the country in question take your money back, but it can inflate their currency to the point of worthlessness (see Zimbabwe). They could also end up becoming a failed state if there’s a prolonged political crisis of some sort. If we end up in Boogaloo Civil War, the value of the dollar will fall by quite a lot because the USA will lose credibility as a stable country. The dollars right now is propped up by being backed as the currency that oil is traded in, but this could change and in fact both Russia and China want to change it. If that happens, you lose a major reason that people ever wanted the dollar. To cut this short, to be tied to the dollar means being tied to the fortunes of the USA, which, while it used to be a sure thing, may not continue to be as steady. Gold isn’t tied to the fortunes of any country therefore, no matter what happens, it’s not going to be devalued by the failure of that state.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3hr ago
I consider this a strong recommendation and I'm going to check it out (when I can wrest the Netflix from my family.) Thanks!
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
3hr ago
I hope the autogen subtitles work.
KingOfTheBailey
3hr ago
It took a couple of read-throughs of HPMOR for me to get that a) Harry was not being held up by EY as a role model, and b) the main moral of the story is that (spoilers all)
nfhs82nsa12
4hr ago
Modern day pagans deny that Apollo and other Greek gods had male lovers, claiming that that these myths may have been subversively introduced to undermine the revival of old European religions.
Wikipedia tells me Apollo and other gods had many male lovers.. Who is correct?
ResoluteRaven
4hr ago
My source was the following passage I remembered reading from The Chinese in America by Iris Chang:
Back in 1880, on the eve of the Exclusion Act, the male-female ratio in the ethnic Chinese community was more than twenty to one—100,686 men and 4,779 women. By 1920, deaths and departures had reduced the male Chinese population, while a small number of births had increased the female population, but there were still seven Chinese men for every Chinese woman. One significant cause of this disproportion was that U.S. immigration policies prevented Chinese workingmen from bringing their wives into the country. The law automatically assigned to women the status of their husbands, so if their husbands were categorized as “laborers,” their wives would be, too, making them ineligible for admission to the country. Only the wives of bona fide Chinese merchants were welcome.
So the arrival of any Chinese female in the United States was a rare event. From 1906 to 1924, only about one hundred fifty Chinese women secured legal permission to enter the United States. Then the Immigration Act of 1924 was enacted, prohibiting the entrance of any foreign-born Asian woman. Aimed primarily at ending the practice of Japanese mail-order brides, it hurt the Chinese American community as well: from 1924 to the end of the decade, not a single Chinese woman was admitted to the United States.
Corvos
4hr ago
The other side of the argument is that a grade should be based on what students actually know, not who they're (un)fortunate enough to study with. When I taught at a university, there were rigorous standards for what a 1 / 2.1 / 2.2 / 3 level essay should look like. You write First level essays, you get a First. End of. Of course, inflation is a thing. Especially since anything below 2.1 is now a death knell careerwise.
But I dislike the idea of grading on a curve. It seems to me that it encourages cheating, backbiting, competitive revision and resentment of other students. Too much competition can be as toxic as too little.
nfhs82nsa12
4hr ago
@TitaniumButterfly says that black people are less human than other groups of humans:
My take on 'humans' outside of those groups is that they're something more like children than like non-humans. The trouble, of course, is that they generally don't have the capacity to grow into members of those groups. So they're something else, a third category between children and animals. Something more like permanently disabled children which are helpful dependents at best and, if they get strong and numerous enough, serious existential threats to the system and individuals within it. Their existences are often improved by domestication (honest question: is that word okay? I feel like it's exactly the one I want, no shade) and in the process they can participate in the grand project and enjoy in many of its fruits.
Having talked to black people, visited black countries, dated black people, I submit that this objectively false and black people, collectively, are indeed human.
Jiro
4hr ago
You are taking that cartoon out of context. It isn't saying that the patrient's arm fell off because of diabetes. It's showing the patient complaining about one thing, and the doctor telling him routine boilerplate about losing weight that has nothing whatsoever to do with the patient's problem. The patient is not ignoring the doctor's advice about weight, the doctor is ignoring the patient's complaint by mentioning weight.
Note that the cartoon nowhere says "diabetes" or "fat shaming".
TIRM
4hr ago
"Your understanding" is, respectfully, "just trust me, bro". But yes, some significant portion of 19th century women immigrating to America were prostitutes. Chinese included.
There's an obvious point that young men are most willing and able to immigrate or take other massive risks. Are you claiming a particular point about 19th century Chinese immigrants supportable by historical evidence? Or did they bring the standard crew of mid-19th-century immigrant women with them?
Jiro
4hr ago
Every acupuncturist I know tells me to see an acupuncturist. It's funny how that works.
And every evolutionary scientist will tell you that to learn about the origins of life, you need to avoid creationists and should go to someone whose background is learning evolution. Sometimes when X tell you to see X, they're correct.
The funny bit is that this is kind of true. The reason stars usually have planets is that a contracting gas cloud has to shed angular momentum to slow down its spin enough to contract to stellar size, and the only way to do that (prior to the star getting hot enough to create stellar winds) is to shift it into orbits - either it splits into two and becomes a binary (with the angular momentum stuffed into the stars' orbit around each other) or it spits out a disc of matter around its equator that coalesces into planets (with the angular momentum stuffed into the planets' orbits).
Of course, Jupiter doesn't have excess angular momentum, so it's not going to spit out the Great Red Spot or anything else.
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